If you look at the way things are going now, you might realize that miners have lost the plot. They are sabotaging the whole Bitcoin experiment, because they want to make more profit and if they cannot do this, they will attack the minority chain to achieve their goal.
You should have had a look what happened with the ETH/ETC split. You don't know what "miners want". You just hear some vocal people say a lot of things, but are they the official "representative" of the miner cartel ? People were also claiming that miners were going to attack the minority chain ETC. It didn't happen. Miners want to make profit, period. They don't waste their precious hash power on war games that profit THEIR PEERS.
The only thing that is happening, is that miners are essentially quite happy with the current form of bitcoin, it brings them guaranteed fees in the future, and don't want this to be MODIFIED seriously. Core has decided to force a modification upon them which would take the essence of the fees to another layer. THIS is what miners don't want. So they will side with anybody who helps them stop these modifications. They want immutability, because it suits them. Immutability was what bitcoin was designed for. Bitcoin is what it is, and will not change if that change is against the interests of a part of the community. That was the whole idea. Only (technical) changes that don't matter for people's situation can eventually be implemented.
Bitcoin's immutability mechanism is at full steam, and is protecting the protocol from any changes. It is all that is happening. Nothing more. Bitcoin is what it is, and will remain what it is.
Note that deep down, miners wouldn't mind bigger blocks right now, as their income is still mainly block reward. They are thinking after the next halving. Sooner or later (bitcoin's fundamental design) fees will have to replace block reward. That can only happen if transactions are scarce. So transactions HAVE TO BE SCARCE FOR BITCOIN TO FUNCTION in the long run.
That was in the system since the beginning, but as long as there were big block rewards, people weren't thinking of that. The last block halving has signalled the beginning of the end of that period when transactions were cheap. Now, they have to become expensive to pay for PoW.
I disagree strongly. SegWit comes with a Block size increase and it is conveniently ignored.
Because *they don't want a block size increase*, and *certainly* not a second layer. A finite block size increase, they could cope with even if they don't like it.
They are getting greedy and there are no other logical reason why they would block SegWit. The LN takes some of these fees to a second layer, that are accessible to everyone.
Bitcoin's basic idea is that everyone is greedy, and hence stops everyone else from changing rules that go against one's greed. That is "immutability". Stopping others from making you less greedy. The fundamental principle of decentralization: non-colluding greedy people, that won't allow any changes that bring more to another one --> only possible consensus is status quo --> immutability.
Some tx's still need to be done on the 1st layer, so it does not take away ALL the fees from that layer.
The fee market is only interesting if it is under pressure, if there is scarcity of transactions, and people have to fight amongst one another to get their transaction through.
Otherwise, you would be at fee levels like before the 1 MB limit hit: much, much less than the block reward. The total of fees must rise to about 6 BTC per block before the next halving, and to 9 BTC per block before the following halving, in order to keep miner income constant and secure PoW.
Today:
https://blockchain.info/charts/transaction-feestotal transaction fees per day: about 200 BTC. During a day, there are about 144 blocks so the fee reward is 1.4 BTC per bloc *because the market is under pressure*. Without pressure, that was about 50 BTC per day, so only about 0.3 BTC fee per bloc.
At that fee level, blocks should become 20 times bigger in order to become 6 BTC at the next halving ; probably not realistic. However, with the market under pressure, the SAME 1 MB brings in 4 times more, and there is extra potential.
In other words, fees are much more interesting if transactions are scarce and fees per transaction are high, than if we have super large blocks with loads of transactions with low fee. The more people fight for the few transactions that can go on a small block, the more miners are assured to keep their income at the next halving.
It even secures against market crashing: if they can pump up the fees in BTC because of scarcity, they care less about lower market $$ value of bitcoin. If the fee amount doubles in the market, they can have up to a halving of the bitcoin price and market cap in $$.
There's more to be pressured out of the fee market, than hope for doubling or tripling of bitcoin's price soon.
This is why miners LOVE 1 MB blocks and no second layer.